New spark for Sharks? NAL team eyes future after ownership shakeup

Saturday

Amid an ownership shakeup, the Jacksonville Sharks are working through new challenges as they pursue stability in the six-team National Arena League.

For Kevin Wezniak, the new realities and the new challenges for the Jacksonville Sharks began to sink in about four weeks before the National Arena League team took its first snap.

He wasn't on the football field or in a meeting room. The Sharks' chairman was in his kitchen. There was work to be done. Somebody had to do it.

So the bearded and tattooed former United States Navy officer shifted into seamster mode for a day.

"I'm at my kitchen table, sewing nameplates on jerseys myself," he remembered, "just to get it done."

With a revamped ownership structure, the Jacksonville Sharks are pushing forward for the third season of the National Arena League, continuing with Saturday night's game against the Carolina Cobras at VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena.

The 2019 season is the Sharks' first without Jeff Bouchy, who departed the ownership group earlier this year. Although Bouchy was still listed as the operating manager on the Sharks' website until earlier this month, he no longer runs the franchise that he helped form a decade ago in the Arena Football League.

In a statement to the Times-Union this week, Bouchy said he sold the team in early March and now focuses on his promotional products business, thanking fans "for supporting the Sharks for these ten years (and) allowing us to bring two championships to this city while doing many great things for our community."

Wezniak described the move as "a very complicated and time-sensitive transition." He said he didn't begin direct management of the team until about five weeks before the April 13 kickoff.

A Massachusetts native who recalled first arriving in Jacksonville around 1980 and now has a home in Fleming Island, Wezniak said he got his first taste of the indoor game nearly two decades ago when he watched the now-defunct Jacksonville Tomcats compete in the old second-level af2, a developmental league for the AFL

Then in retirement, he became a minority Sharks owner about five years ago after former Motley Crüe singer Vince Neil departed to launch a new AFL franchise in Las Vegas.

Strengthening the team's standing off the field, Wezniak said, tops the priority list.

"We need to work better as a business," he said. "You can have the best football team in the world, but if you're not putting people in the stands, you're not getting sponsors, you're not getting advertisers, then the business part of it is going to go away."

The post-Bouchy ownership group continues to take shape. The team announced the addition of Nick Furris to the group at the end of April, joining a group consisting of Wezniak, team president Steve Curran, Rob Storm, Diva Nagula and Jason Green.

The NAL website also lists Storm as one of two owners of the Carolina Cobras.

Wezniak wouldn't rule out further additions, but he said he's satisfied with where the Sharks' ownership group stands.

"We've got the right mix of people," he said. "We've got guys who really understand the financial side of the business, guys who really understand what it takes to field a team guys who understand the media side of it."

Still, challenges remain.

Those include reestablishing relationships with sponsors, vendors and arena operator SMG. They also involve rekindling the crowd enthusiasm that marked the Sharks' peak earlier in the decade.

Wezniak acknowledged attendance was lower than expected for the opener against the New York Streets. The NAL does not release full attendance data on its website, although the Sharks regularly announced crowds in excess of 10,000 in the early and mid-2010s.

The team is searching for new ways to draw fans to the arena, like a Fortnite theme for Saturday's Carolina game.

"I don't even know what that is," Wezniak said of the popular online video game, "but we're doing it."

He said the team's focus is on its core fan — die-hard football lovers who crave gridiron action outside the sport's traditional fall season — while also promoting the Sharks as an exciting outing for families in Jacksonville's increasingly crowded entertainment marketplace.

Wezniak said the league has normally minimized schedule clashes with the Jumbo Shrimp, although simultaneous games will happen five times this year, including Saturday.

A bigger challenge, he said, has come from the rise of hockey's Icemen, particularly in the quest to secure sponsorships. The ECHL Icemen, formerly of Evansville, Ind., announced their Jacksonville arrival in February 2017, shortly after the Sharks had left the AFL for the NAL.

Not only was the NAL new and unproven, a concern that Wezniak said deterred some advertisers, but the Icemen also played 36 regular-season home games each year at the arena compared to the Sharks' seven or eight.

There's nothing he can do about that fact. But he believes that the atmosphere of football's minor leagues provides its own draw, with players hungry for a chance to work their way into a camp with the NFL — or, as Wezniak calls it, "the other league."

"There's passion on every down," Wezniak said. "You don't see guys just lounging around. Even the guys on the bench are into it, and that's what I like."

Then, there's the matter of winning.

On the field, the Sharks have won their last two to improve to 2-1 entering Saturday's game with Carolina. They're relying on an aerial attack built around quarterback Jonathan Bane, the league's total yardage leader, and a prolific corps of receivers, notably Devin Wilson, whose 29 receptions thus far lead the NAL.

In the NAL, where player pay is a minuscule fraction of NFL salaries — hundreds per game, not millions per year — head coach Siaha Burley said the sport's economics tip the balance toward scouting players from around the region.

"We're working on trying to get local talent as much as possible, at least in the proximity of the state," Burley said. "Guys can play in front of family, they're closer to home."

Of the 25 players on the current roster, 14 list hometowns in the Southeast.

For all the obstacles, Wezniak said he believes the team is in better shape than it was a year ago at this time. He described the team's prior course as "no longer sustainable."

"Our 2013, 2012 seasons were probably our best seasons as a business," Wezniak said. "We want to get back to that."

By the standards of the six-team NAL, in the middle of its third season of competition, the Sharks are a virtual oasis of stability: They have an arena in their home city in which to play, a fan base with its established traditions and a decade of history that includes titles in two leagues.

Four of the other six teams have only formed within the past two years, while the New York Streets compete at the Westchester County Center in White Plains, N.Y. after originally planning to play part of their schedule at Madison Square Garden.

The Sharks won the AFL's ArenaBowl in 2011 and captured the inaugural NAL championship at the arena in 2017.

"We're still the only professional football team in Jacksonville that's won championships, which is fun," Wezniak said.

Of the eight teams that founded the NAL at the end of 2016, only the Sharks and the Columbus Lions survive within the league. But Burley said Jacksonville's more settled track record gives the team an edge when recruiting players.

"A lot of the guys I've talked to, more this year than last, say, 'Coach, I just want to win a championship,'" Burley said. "So if they're trying to come here, they're saying we're already being seen as [a contender]."

Wezniak said he's confident that the owners of the two new franchises, the New York Streets and the Orlando Predators, are committed to long-term goals and have the business competence to achieve them. Further expansion, he said, is in the works.

Accordingly, he believes the NAL is now on the road to stability, though he doesn't envision a return of arena football's late-1990s and early-2000s heyday with a 16-team league and 32 teams in the second-tier af2.

But he does see a future for the sport in leagues laid out on a more regional basis — even the once-national AFL is now a six-team circuit with no teams west of Ohio or south of Washington, D.C. Wezniak also said talks have begun toward a possible championship series matching winners of the various indoor leagues, something he believes will further strengthen the sport.

So Wezniak and the Sharks plan to carry on. No matter the workload. One game, or one nameplate, at a time.

"Even when I first became a partner with the Sharks but wasn't a day-to-day manager, if you'd asked me where I'd be in four or five years, I'd have said probably golfing, fishing, that's it," he said. "But here I am."

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